It's just a comment. Maybe it's relevant, maybe not. In any case, Mishan doesn't get the editorial scrutiny she needs. Fabricant knows how to report and write it as clear prose (I copyedited a book by her some years ago). I don't know about Meehan directly, but given the number of books where he is the "and" or "with" writer, he's probably pretty trustworthy. Mishan writes as if she were trying to be the E. L. James of restaurants.

I don't actually know what a handbasket is -- but whatever they are, singer-songwriters are in the first ones going to hell. -- Sneakeater, 29 March 2018 - 12:06 AM

It offers exactly the sensation as kissing an extremely attractive person for the first time — a bolt of surprise and pleasure combined. The salt and fat give way to primal sweetness and combine in deeply agreeable ways. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the body. . . .

. . . a geoduck clam with fresh chilies and lemon helps explain in one bite why men would dive amid huge swells to retrieve the things from the angry Pacific. . . .

Jhal muri, a heap of puffed rice, peanuts, tomato and onions, with a trickle-down of coriander chutney and a sweet-sour kiss of tamarind on top, gets its sneaky heat from mustard oil. That ingredient recurs in more volatile form in a chutney accompanying a classic Bengali fish fry of tilapia gilded with bread crumbs, and in a paste slapped on flounder, which is then steamed inside a banana leaf that functions as a sort of ancient Cryovac, trapping and concentrating the flavors.

You know, it could be that her "food writing" is the anomaly, and the other stuff is what she really wants to do. Lippy beat me to it: She's an MFA (Cornell, 1995) so maybe she feels she has to get her dictionary's worth. I do like this quote:

A previous editor once offered some advice: stop writing about the food so much.

Unfortunately, she did not take that advice to heart, no matter what the author of the Cornell article says. That piece also says:

Regular readers of Hungry City may be unsurprised to learn that Mishan has a background in poetry. After graduating from Princeton and spending a year in Russia teaching English to members of the Supreme Soviet, she earned an MFA from Cornell's famously selective two-year program, which accepts only four poets into each class. After completing her master's she returned to her native Hawaii and got a job in advertising. "I worked a lot on travel accounts," she recalls, "so there was room for writing about pretty things." She held several posts at the New Yorker, including proofreading and website editing, before being tapped to write the magazine's Tables for Two reviews, which led to an offer from the Times. "I see myself as an accidental food writer; I definitely stumbled into that subject matter," she says. "There's always this tension for me between poetry and clarity—wanting the language to be vivid and different, but running into the hurdle that of course it has to be perfectly clear."

(emphasis added) She fails on clarity, that's for sure.

I don't actually know what a handbasket is -- but whatever they are, singer-songwriters are in the first ones going to hell. -- Sneakeater, 29 March 2018 - 12:06 AM

To be honest, I've always suspected Ms Mishan's day job was with the likes of n+1 or Triple Canopy. She seems to have written quite regularly for The New Yorker. I was sort of depressed to learn she's older than I am [not that I'm anything like as successful as she's been, but her enthusiastic prose style would be more understandable in a writer a few years out of college].

I used to be an avid reader of cyberpunk, and I'm not altogether certain that Mishan's read Neuromancer recently. But the NYRB rarely seems to accord 'genre' fiction much respect.

Writing about food does strange things to people. Remember there was a whole blog devoted to hilarious parodies of Bruni's style in his early days as critic? And he's been a higher flyer than Ligaya (poetry!).